When Business Objects got acquired by SAP earlier this year, it made a statement that it plans to continue to remain an open, heterogeneous BI vendor, treating all partners equally. Apparently, all partners are not created equal – and, as we suspected and long predicted, this Business Objects strategy does not extend to its own parent.

Well, the cat's finally out of the bag. Efforts are already underway at SAP to improve the existing connectivity between Business Objects products and SAP applications. The improved connectivity that may result from these efforts will be very much optimized for Business Objects products only. SAP states that "SAP customers who instead decide to move forward with non-SAP third party BI tools will not benefit from these types of improvements and enhancements."

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As predicted
by Forrester, New
CEO Paul Maritz announced this week that VMware will drop the price of ESXi (their base server
hypervisor) to $0 (from $495).
This obviously comes in response to Microsoft Hyper-V
pricing ($28 per server) and as competition to the free open source Xen
hypervisor.

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The
technology shift is obvious. Enterprises
are increasingly networking their storage with Ethernet. If Fibre Channel lives
on, it will live on as Fibre Channel over Ethernet. And like other technology
domains, there is a demand for a single vendor for all networking gear. It’s
one throat to choke. But what on earth took Brocade so long?

Cisco
marched into the Fibre Channel switching market five years ago and has been forcing Brocade’s hand ever since. Brocade’s
acquisition of rival McData was a clear example of a land grab to fend off
Cisco’s increasing market share, not a step forward in evolving network technology.

I'll give you five seconds to recover from your pun-induced groaning [5...4...3...2...1] Now, on to the news: Open Text announced late last week that it has acquired eMotion, a software-as-a-service digital asset management (DAM) product, from Corbis. Open Text plans to rebrand eMotion as Artesia on Demand for Marketing, complementing its full-featured, installed Artesia DAM product.

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IBM's PR engine has been ratcheting up the volume about its efforts in cloud computing lately and if you are like me, I found their press releases confusing, so I got them on the phone to try and get past the hype to better understand what they are really doing in this space. Turns out they have turned on a powerful listening and learning engine.

IBM’s BlueCloud initiative isn't (at least not initially) an attempt to become a cloud services provider or to become a cloud computing platform, but rather to help their customers experiment with, try out, and custom design cloud solutions to fit their needs. Building off the IBM Innovation Center concept, IBM is providing Cloud centers that are places customers from enterprise and government accounts, as well as non-IBM customers can test out cloud computing concepts, mostly for deployment internal to their own data centers. Gerrit Huizenga, the technical solutions architect for BlueCloud for IBM's Systems & Technology Group (STG) said these efforts are helping them build out a series of cloud blueprints, or proven/standardized cloud infrastructures. "Our goal is to deliver solutions that make it much easier to deploy and manage these things," Huizenga said.

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As a security guy, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the security ramifications of wireless connectivity. Wireless has evolved from a single protocol, 802.11b, to a veritable alphabet soup loosely defined as "Mobility." We now have 11a/b/g and maybe n, Bluetooth, RFID, CDMA, Wi-Max, and a bunch of other stuff that all provides wireless access, often without even a thought of security. As people scramble to have the latest, coolest, most connected devices in the company, they are tossing security right out the window.

BI is essentially a set of best practices for building models to answer business questions. However, today's BI best practices may be suboptimal for many enterprises' decision-support requirements.

For most users, BI is a journey that's been modeled and mapped out in advance by others, following a well-marked path through vast data sets. Data models, which must often be pre-built by specialists, generate or shape the design of such key BI artifacts as queries, reports, and dashboards. Essentially, every BI application is some data modeler's prediction of the types of questions that users will want to ask of the underlying data marts. Sometimes, those predictions are little more than an educated guess -- and are not always on the mark.

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TechCrunchIT reported today that a Rackspace data center went down for several hours during the evening due to a power grid failure. Because Rackspace is a managed service provider (MSP), the downtime affected several businesses hosted in the data center.